Underskog

A concert tribute to Jacques Lacan tar utgangspunkt i den franske psykiateren Lacan. For å forstå Freuds begreper om ”super ego” og ”dødsønsket” introduserte Lacan ”The Lamella” som et symbol på ”begjæret” i menneskets psyke. A concert tribute to Jacques Lacan undersøker polariseringen av islamsk kontra vestlig kultur gjennom etableringen av fiendebilder i animerte dataspill.

Ane Lan har tidligere satt fokus på psykoanalysen i performancearbeidene Sirkel (2009) og Drømmekammeret (2006). Sirkel tok utgangspunkt i Jungs teorier, mens Drømmekammeret presenterte Freud. Lans undersøkelse av ikoniske tenkere vil videreføres med et iscenesatt, dialogbasert videoarbeid om Julia Kristeva (2011-2012).

*Galleri Maria Veie proudly presents “A concert tribute to Jacques Lacan” by Ane Lan. The concert is based on the French psychiatrist Lacan’s theories. Lacan introduced “the Lamella” as a symbol of human desire to understand Freud’s concepts of “The super ego” and the “Death Drive”. “A concert tribute to Jacques Lacan” examines the polarization between Islamic versus Western culture through the creation of enemy images in animated video games.

Ane Lan has previously focused on psycho-analysis in her performance works Sirkel (2009) and Dream Chamber (2006). Circle was based on Jung’s theories, while the Dream Chamber presented Freud. Lan’s examination of iconic theorists will continue with a staged, dialogue-based video work of Julia Kristeva (2011 —).*

Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (1901 –81) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary theory, and has been called ‘the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud. Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France’s intellectuals in the 1960s and the 1970s, especially the post-structuralist philosophers. His interdisciplinary work was as a ‘self-proclaimed Freudian”. His ideas have had a significant impact on critical theory, literary theory, twentieth-century French philosophy, sociology, feminist theory and clinical psychoanalysis.

Lacan started his “return to Freud” with the linguistic reading of the entire psychoanalytic edifice, encapsulated by what is perhaps his single best-known formula: “The unconscious is structured as a language”. The predominant perception of the unconscious is that it is the domain of irrational drives, something opposed to the rational conscious self. Lacan points out that the Freudian unconscious cased such a scandal not because of the claim that the rational self is subordinated to the much vaster domain of blind irrational instincts, but because it demonstrated how the unconscious itself obeys its own grammar and logic: the unconscious talks and thinks. The unconscious is not the preserve of wild drives that have to be tamed by the ego, but the site where a traumatic truth speaks out. Lacan suggests; “I should dare to approach the site of my truth”, what awaits me there is not a deep truth that I have to identify with, but an unbearable truth I have to learn to live with. For Lacan, psychoanalysis is at its most fundamental not a theory and technique of treating psychic disturbances, but a theory and practice that confront individuals with the most radical dimension of human existence. It does not show an individual the way to accommodate him/herself to the demands of social reality; instead it explains how something like “reality” constitutes itself in the first place.

“Whenever the membranes of the egg in which the foetus emerges on its way to becoming a new-born are broken, imagine for a moment that something flies off, and can happen as easily with a human being as with an egg, namely the hommelette, or the Lamella. The Lamella is something extra-flat, which moves like the amoeba, just a little bit more complicated. It is related to what the sexed being looses in sexuality, it is, like the amoeba, in relation to sexed beings, immortal – because it survives any division, and scissiparous intervention. It is the libido, qua pure life instinct, that is to say, immortal life, irrepressible life, life that needs no organ, simplified, indestructible life. It is precisely what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction.” Jacques Lacan (Ecrits)

Lacan imagine the Lamella as a version of what Freud called “partial object”: a weird organ that is magically autonomized, surviving without the body whose organ it should have been, like the hand that wanders around alone in early surrealist films. The Lamella do not exist, it insists: it is unreal, an entity of pure semblance, a multiplicity of appearances that seem to enfold a central void – its status is purely phantasmatic. This blind indestructible insistence of the libido is what Freud called the “death drive”, the uncanny excess of life, the “undead” urge that persists beyond the biological cycle of life and death.